Godbond (6 page)

“Yes,” I said softly, “but surely you feel heart's hunger even to think of the white antelope of the peaks.” They stared at me with faint frowns as their slow wits tried to comprehend what I was saying, and in a sort of trance created by my own words I turned and got quietly onto Talu, even though the horse could scarcely move in the strait place where I had led her. I mounted her just so that I would be able to gaze off toward the snowpeaks. “Where is Sakeema?” I asked again. “I must find him while the mountains still stand for you to tread upon.”

A babble went up of a sort I was not expecting. “He is not here!” blurted a huge granite-gray Cragsman who loomed to my left.

“He's gone!” agreed another.

“The place is empty except for—”

“Silence!” thundered the slate-blue leader, furious, his shout echoing away in the quiet that at once followed. He turned on me and pointed his cudgel at my head, enraged but uncertain, shifting his great weight from foot to massive foot in annoyance or unease. “Who are you,” he demanded, “that we should bandy words with you?”

It was time to show mettle. “Who is my brother Ytan,” I retorted, “that you should obey him? Is it not he who sent you here to waylay me?”

“No!” bawled the granite-gray Cragsman. “We always guard this place!”

The blue one swung toward him in menace—I saw a rivalry there. “Be silent!” he bellowed at the other Cragsman, and to me he said fiercely, “Who are you?”

I had told them Ytan was my brother, so they had to know I was a son of Tyonoc. They had seen me and fought against me before. Why, then, did they ask who I was? And what was I to tell them? That my name was Dannoc, or Darran, whatever? Blast and confound them, what would be the use of telling them either?

I did not know how to answer, not with the mighty blackwood club nearly grazing my face and wonder spinning along with the fear in my mind. A guarded place, just beyond them? Of what sort? What did they mean, saying Sakeema was gone from that place? Some sign of him there, perhaps? “Sakeema,” I breathed aloud in wonder or in plea, and to my astonishment the Cragsmen stepped a pace back from me. Even their slate-blue leader stepped back, and his club wavered. On the Cragsmen's hard faces came a look of doubt and awe.

“No!” I exclaimed. They thought I was taking the name of Sakeema—how could that be? Why did they not laugh? It was laughable, or it was blasphemy, and even for the sake of saving my skin I could not let it happen. “No, I mean—people of the peaks, what are the tales you tell of the coming of Sakeema?” I was pleading, eager. “Where do you say is his resting place?”

Roars of anger answered me. Anger, glaring in their faces along with a plain disappointment. They surged toward me. “Bah! Kill him,” the granite-colored one shouted. Clubs swung up.

But the blue leader, who stood nearest me, turned on them furiously. “We kill him when I say!” he thundered.

“When you say! We'll be here all day, waiting till you say!”

They quarreled and tussled, taking sides, their roars and rumblings echoing off the mountainpeaks, their blows and shovings shaking the rocks—I heard the name of Sakeema shouted in tones fit to make the mountains shudder. The rivals were bludgeoning each other, some of the other Cragsmen doing the same and the rest of them clustering around like so many gawking stones, gray, greenish, tan, rimrock red. Few of them fixed their hard eyes on me any longer. When their uproar had reached a hopeful height I sent Talu quietly forward—

A club came smashing down across my path, the slate-blue leader's glare met me, and within an eyeblink the commotion, which I had considered to be at its height, redoubled. By my mother's bones, but it must have been a precious thing they guarded! I had not thought they could come out of their quarrel so quickly to turn on me. One more breath and I would be dead—I could feel rage hot as blood in the air. But Talu, as terrified as I, reared high. Teetering on her hind legs, she somehow managed to turn in the narrow space between rocks, and at a plunging, panicky gallop she took me back the way we had come.

I was in nearly as much danger from her as I had been from the Cragsmen. I could not have stopped her if I had tried—and, mindful of wrathful enemies not far behind me, I did not try—but Talu's every wild leap threatened to throw me against a boulder, or smash my knee against one, or my head against a tree, or send us both crashing down when she snapped a leg between stones. Her hooves slipped and scrabbled on dizzying slopes—this was terrain that scarcely should have been ridden at a slow walk! I held onto her by clinging to her mane until she took a man-tall drop at a leap, but then I considered that I had had enough. Moreover, there was a thought in me that I did not wish to be carried too far from the place the Cragsmen so fervidly guarded. So I swung down by her neck and took my chances with a landing on hard rock. Then I lay, the breath knocked out of me, and watched her plunge crazily away, and took accounting of my bodily harm. Bruises, nothing worse.

Behind me, out of sight but not yet out of tongueshot, I heard the noise of the Cragsmen, who were quarreling still. I lay where I was until their uproar had quieted, that and my ragged breathing and the thumping of my heart. Talu had careered out of sight and hearing. I rose cautiously and walked away from the direction she had gone, back toward the Cragsmen but to one side of them.

It was not hard for a Red Hart hunter on foot to elude Cragsmen. I stalked softly past them, and they knew nothing of it. I dare say they thought I was yet on Talu, blundering back up the mountain. Few travelers are foolish enough to let themselves be separated from horse and gear. But being a fool, and afoot, I found the many boulders more to my liking than I had when they threatened to break my neck. They gave me good cover as I stalked, and though the Cragsmen ceased their scuffling and moved back to lines of guard once again, I eluded them easily enough. I crept between rocks until I had left them behind, and then I softly walked, looking, searching. Even though I did not know for what.

But there was no doubt in me once I saw it.

Boulders ended suddenly, spearpines thinned, sky showed. Underfoot lay a smooth, flat place made of many small stones—I noted that later, for at the time my seeing was all taken up by the crag. An odd sort of tall, jagged crag, very steep, very aspiring, loomed ahead. And in its side opened a most peculiar cave. As I drew nearer, step by slow, cautious step, I noticed that the rock wall around the entry was all networked with small lines, like cracks—they were cracks. With a shock I realized that the crag was no crag, nor the cave a cave.

Name of the god, it was a place made by the long-ago kings whose powers I scarcely understood, a place left from time lost in time.

Chapter Four

Times so long ago, they had been forgptten even in Sakeema's time. Their kings and peoples, unknown even in legend. Even I, a storyteller, had never known of such times and such people until Tassida had told me of them. How she remembered them, I did not know, for there was much I did not know of her. But I had since seen such lodges, though much smaller, standing in Mahela's sad undersea realm.

A strange word Tassida had once told to me:
castle
. This, then, a castle? Awesome, even though silent, empty, ruined.

Gazing, scarcely breathing, I stepped within the shadow of the entry. The place, as I thought, was hollow, like a great hut. It was indeed a dwelling—though the men of those times must have been giants, I thought, to need such a lofty dwelling. Their powers that had raised this great dwelling made of the very bone of the mountain, that had cut the stones and featly fitted them together, had been lost in the many passing seasons. I could feel the weight of deep time, standing in that place. Dim light filtered down through cracks and through the distant top of a tall place, where there had once been, I supposed, a roof.

There were bones strewn about. Something had denned in there since the long-ago people had gone. An animal nearly as lost in time, perhaps a catamount? More likely many sorts of animals. Likely the small squirrels had nested between the rocks of the walls. They were all gone, the creatures, leaving only the ghost, that lived in my mind, as starkly gone as the people who had once lived in this place.

Not much trace of them, the people. Thrones and harps of wood, hangings of cloth had long since rotted into dirt, if such things had been left. I stared around, looking for something, I was not sure what. Surely something lay in this place if the Cragsmen so guarded it, so reverenced it as to leave none of their own clumsy marks there. Something had to be yet left to us of these strange, long-dead people who had sailed on the sea in great ships and built such huge lodges that they could keep fruit trees within them over the winter. People who had painted a strange magic on thin-stretched sheepskins, a potent magic they put in hinged boxes called
books
.… It was such magic I wanted of them, though sheepskins also would have long since rotted away. These folk had been mighty in power and knowledge. Had there been any seers among them, I wondered, any dreamwits, any visionaries? I needed a sign such as no shaman could give me.

“Where is Sakeema?” I whispered aloud to the inside of the silent dwelling of the dead.

The yellow stone in the pommel of my sword began softly to glow. Alar was alert, nearly as alive as I.

Swordlight fell on a stone fallen from the archway of the door, and I saw—no, it was nothing. Only a carving in the stone, an ornament, a trefoil.… Alar's light shone on bare walls, a raised platform of stone, debris, nothing more. But I felt a tremor in her, an urgency, perhaps a longing to match my own. As old as this place was, she might be as old, she, the sword. Perhaps she would show some sign to me.

Drifting, as silent as a leaf on the wind, and trying to be as yielding, as random, I wandered that dim place. There were stone steps to climb, but I felt no urging that way. I turned back toward the center of the great room, where the knee-deep pile of bones and branches lay under the open roof, and I circled it and turned back toward it again, and a third time I found myself facing it. Then I began to think.

Even Cragsmen, if they reverenced a place, would they not have cleaned it of leaf litter and bones and things that stank? Unless, perhaps, they wished to hide something under them.

“All right, Alar,” I murmured, and I strode into the rubbish heap.

Dead things in there, and stench, and a squishy feeling as of wet leaves underfoot. Perhaps something worse. No sane person would have gone into that muck of his own will. “Slime of Mahela!” I protested, and nearly turned to go back. But then I recalled that I was no sane person, but a madman, Mahela's buffoon, and certainly I had not been daintily reared. Standing in the very center of the foul heap, I felt a waiting stillness in the sword, and blithely I dropped to all fours, my hands wrist-deep in filth, and began to scrabble like a badger, sending dirt and branches, bones and scats and bits of dead mouse flying. But I dug to what felt like hard, flat stone, and found nothing.

“What now?” I sourly addressed the sword. “Have you a cuckpot for me to play in, perhaps?”

Alar's jewel flared more brightly, and I saw.

Sunstuff.

Right under me, lying beneath my hands, a glint of that strange, bright, uncommonly beautiful stuff that Tassida called gold, which I had never seen except in Mahela's dwelling beneath far too much green seawater.

Not only the one small glint of it, I discovered as I rooted and scraped and shoved offal to one side. It was a large panel, perhaps as long as my arm and a little less wide than it was long, wrought into some pattern I could not yet see. Once it had been placed on the wall behind the throne, perhaps, or perhaps it had been part of the throne itself. I pulled it gently from its mucky bed and traced the bright curves with my filthy finger, gouging away the dirt.

Trefoil pattern in the corners, the same as I had just seen carved on a stone. But also, in the center of the panel, something more.

There was little enough cloth on me anywhere. I wiped my hands on my deerskin leggings, then worked at the panel again with my fingers, my fingernails, my spittle. Dirt was maddeningly slow to yield, and all I could see beneath it were bright bits of sunstuff in which I could not sense a wholeness. Sitting in some god's midden, cuckpot of sky, I had to scrub and clean my prize with my skin and my hair before I could comprehend. And then I understood nothing.

The middle of the panel bore the emblem of a tree, not a forest tree but some sort of round, tame tree covered with trefoil blossoms. And a long-necked bird of some sort was flying away from the tree, carrying a fruit in its beak. But the fruit was falling into three fragments that scattered to the mountains, the plains, and the sea.

I scarcely looked at the bird, the fruit. My gaze was caught on the tree, for the trunk and some branches of it were made up of three swords crossed in the shape of a six-pointed star, swords just such as Korridun and Tassida and I wore.

But it was overweening, I told myself, to believe that this emblem showed the very same swords. Many such swords must have been made in those forgotten days. Still, I touched the sunstuff swords curiously, tracing their shapes with my fingers. And as I did so, Alar blazed so brightly that I could scarcely see for the sword glory and the glory of the strange substance in my hands.

I looked long at the panel by Alar's warm glow, so long that I could close my eyes and yet see it, shadowed. But nowhere in it could I see Sakeema or a place where I might find him.

Finally, when I began to feel stiff with sitting amid a pile of old bones, I got up, awkwardly hefting the heavy thing I had found. “What am I to do with this?” I muttered. It was too large to take with me, even on horseback, should I ever be so fortunate as to find my horse again. Moreover, I did not want a twelve of Cragsmen pursuing me. And I had a feeling about the sunstuff panel, that people would think it beautiful, that some people would deem it a thing not merely to look at with pleasure but to have, to win, the way the Fanged Horse Folk win slaves and trophies of battle. I did not much like that way of having things, and in the end I put the sunstuff back where I had found it. I carefully covered it up again, making the stinking heap look almost as if it had never been disturbed. And when I had done so, Alar's light faded and went out.